Chris, language please. The problem in lack of decent package manager is something most of us here know for a long time. Hope everyone agrees on this point.
Here we're just focusing to concentrate the work, refactor what key items we need, or can leave out with, re-use and such. At the same time, things must be kept running. So a workaround (for the mean time) is needed. We know that setup.exe is not enough. And as clealy noted, this setup-<whatever>.ini thing is a _workaround_ We need a package manager to allow routine package management tasks to be accomplished in a single command. We need 1- a consistent user interface 2- automated package installation 3- upgrading and searching 4- package removal 5- package builder 6- lookup of package dependency 7- bootstrap cygwin to a clean env 8- generate/modify setup.ini and customize *And everyting must be script-ready* let me know if I left something out The existing and runing system does not allow one to specify a version for a given package/ example) what if package foo 3.1.6 had changed ABI, and 3.1.x (other thatn 6) restored the old ABI. if we have a dependency from bar, either A) if bar is compiled with 3.1.6 , then make sure foo is against 3.1.6 as well B) or check that foo != 3.1.6 , and double check that bar is compiled for version != 3.1.6 Version control using prev|curr|test is not the right way to do things, IMHO I hope this is clear enough example for _one_ of the many reasons why we need and write workarounds. As a side note libzypp =>Depends on mingw boost C++ gtk e2fsporg and so forth... I really like the algorithm they have, but we need it running quick, cheap, and simple. have not looked into it, but if it matches our requirements, prahaps a option. not sure yet. One of the reasons we sill have perl/awk/shell scripts to roll things out, is when things break, its not that hard to fix/patch a workaround. fox